The Open Standard for Public Transport (OSPT) Alliance made its debut today at CARTES & IDentification 2010, introducing an open security standard to foster the next generation of transit fare collection systems.

Now open to new members, the alliance will work to establish an ecosystem of transit operators, technology suppliers, consultants and integrators, government agencies and mobile ecosystem product and service providers to develop new, interoperable transit fare collection solutions based on open-standard security both for current and future fare collection systems.

The OSPT Alliance says its ecosystem will be a key component for advancing Cipurse – the open security standard for transit fare collection. The ecosystem will offer Government agencies and transit operators the opportunity to choose from a number of vendors, consultants and integrators to help them deploy or upgrade to a more secure and cost-effective transit fare collection system. The ecosystem will also provide mobile device manufacturers with next-generation open standard solutions.

“We have adopted open standards for all of our transit applications, including the Contactless e-Purse Application 2009. Now, we are looking to future-proof our fare collection infrastructure by ensuring it is interoperable with NFC mobile devices as they start to be deployed commercially,” said Silvester Prakasam, director of the fare system at Land Transport Authority (LTA) in Singapore. “Cipurse is an important step towards establishing standardized, secure and interoperable fare collection for all public transport schemes, and we plan to adopt it for future releases of CEPAS.”

The Cipurse open security standard defines an authentication scheme, a secure messaging protocol, four minimum mandatory file types and a minimum mandatory command set to access these file types. It also specifies encryption keys and access conditions, and provides a cryptographic protocol that protects against differential power analysis (DPA) and differential fault analysis (DFA).

Cipurse builds upon existing open standards, such as the ISO 7816 smart card standard and the 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES-128) and the ISO/IEC 14443-4 protocol layer to provide a platform for securing both new and legacy transit fare collection applications, thus giving it the potential to be used within existing application frameworks around the world, according to OSPT.